Premodern Asian History

open access digital library of pre-modern Chinese texts

... a subset of the Bodleian Library's allegro catalogue of Chinese books, which has been designed to show the extent and nature of our pre-modern holdings, and to give access to those parts of the collection that have been digitised.

This is part of Library of Congress's "World Digital Library" project. Religion, history, geography, government administration, literature, medicine, technology, and early translations of European books into Chinese are represented in the collection. These documents can also be viewed on an interactive map.

Buddhist Digital Resource Center (formerly Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center) is dedicated to preserving and sharing Buddhist texts through the union of technology and scholarship. Touches on the 8th-21st centuries.

Humanity's repository of the Buddhist wisdom: the full text of 85 volumes of Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō (大正新脩大藏經), is now available on-line.

This collection includes more than 100,000 digital facsimiles of objects (e.g., ceramics, brass implements, etc.) and art (e.g., paintings, illustrations, etc.). Interface in Chinese or English, metadata entirely in Chinese. Browsing possible in English.

More than 500 digital facsimiles of maps of China ranging from the 12th to the 20th century. Locations of origin range from within China to the CIA in the United States.

Posted from January 1, 2009, the Geography Institute of Academia Sinica conflated Prof. Yan Gengwang's 嚴耕望 canonical studies and maps of the Tang dynasty, other more general historical maps and Google maps.

Watch the world's reigning pipa virtuoso play.

The Chinese pipa, a four-string plucked lute, descends from West and Central Asian prototypes and appeared in China during the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534). This MET essay discusses the subsequent history and provides digital facsimiles to some of the instruments and representations.

The rubbings were made from ancient stone stelae, tomb tablets, and Buddhist and Daoist scriptures on stelae and rocks, as well as from inscriptions and designs from bronze vessels, jade objects, ceramics, tomb bricks, and roof tiles. Objects used to make the rubbings in the collection date from the Qin Dynasty (221–207 BCE) to the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 CE).

The East Asian Library of UC Berkeley has more than 1,500 items in its rubbings collection, which contains many albums of model calligraphy (fa-tieh 法帖), bronze inscriptions, and stone rubbings. About half of the collection date before the year 1000.

This database was developed by the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, based on its bronze collections. There are several related databases that are accessible through this website.

Zhejiang University Library has developed a free access database of epitaphs. It contains 6,800 records. Majority collections are Tang epitaphs. Most of the images of the rubbings are scanned and can be browsed or saved.

This database is the digital collection of Han bamboo and wood slips held by the Academia Sinica. Among them are more than 11,000 pieces that were excavated from 居延.

This digital collection of oracle bone rubbings held in the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica can be searched by subjects, reference sources or transcriptions.

Interface and content in Chinese.
This database is developed by the Institute of History and Philosophy, Academia Sinica. The rubbings are from the Fu Sinian Library collection. The rubbings date from 946 to 1382 AD and majority of the collection are Yuan Dynasty rubbings. The collection has about 1,910 pieces of rubbings.

IDP is a ground-breaking international effort to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artifacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet, and to encourage their use in educational and research programs.

Interface in English or Chinese
The Fu Ssu-nien Library at Academia Sinica contains forty-nine manuscripts that appear to be from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries. Thirty-six are in Chinese, nine in Tibetan, one in Tangut, one in Uighur and two are images of buddhas.

The Xiangtangshan Caves Project is a collaborative initiative to further understanding on the rich art and visual culture of the late Northern Dynasties in early medieval China.

"Digital humanities research project [2003-2016] about creating digital archives of cultural heritage based on collaboration between informatics and humanities." Includes maps, translations of travel accounts, and more.

The Yale Silk Road Database presents over 11,000 images of major sites in the Silk Road region taken during faculty site seminars led by Mimi Hall Yiengpruksawan (Professor, History of Art) under the auspices of the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University in the summers of 2006-2010.The collection serves as a multi-disciplinary resource with relevance to students and faculty working in the fields of art and archaeology, religious studies, history, East Asian languages and literatures, Central Asian and Islamic studies.